


Exhale

by sakurasencha



Series: Bread and Roses [3]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: 70th Hunger Games, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, Odesta, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-02-03 01:08:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1725623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakurasencha/pseuds/sakurasencha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finnick and Annie and learning to breathe again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exhale

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Caesar's Palace ff.net forum's monthly one shot challenge for May, for the prompt, "But you can't breathe in if you don't breathe out." I wasn't intending on writing anything but inspiration struck at the final hour (and literally written in an hour, ha!), so here you go!

_But you can't breathe in if you don't breathe out._

* * *

__

 

“What’s it like?”

“What?”

“You know….” Sylvia Cresta made vague, meaningless gestures with her hands, mouthed _the arena_ slowly and methodically, like a child just learning how to read.

Annie hugged her knees tighter. “Oh.” She bent her head down and trembled from head to toe.

“Mom! It’s happening again!” Their mother shouted her way up the stairs, scolded young Sylvia back down them. When mother was alone with her fractured eldest and everything was sorrow and silence, she draped one arm over her daughter’s shoulders and stayed that way till the shaking calmed, the breathing slowed, and the sun was long sunk beneath the blue-black waters that shifted from beyond the open window.

She laid Annie’s head down upon a cool pillow and covered the rest of her with a sheet.

For hours Annie stared blankly up. No light seeped into her remote little corner to guide her, and she whispered into the night, the sea of darkness that threatened to engulf her:

“Like holding your breath.”

 

* * *

  


The irony of Annie’s win was not lost on the population of Panem. Originally, she’d been slated among the top five contenders with her fay personality and sleek ability to handle a blade. But her position nose-dived to last place after a well-placed slice by a scimitar, the soundless scream of her district partner as he stared up at her from vacant eyes no longer attached to a body.  


She screamed. She ran.

She never stopped running.

She was mad, they said. And easy pickings. Everyone knew it and adjusted accordingly.

Later, Annie would wish that she had been in her right mind so she could have laughed in all their faces when every bet was upset. _How could this happen?_ Game analysts were having a field day. Conjectures were tossed to and fro like skiffs in a storm. Was it an accident, intentional? The Districts didn’t know, the Capitolites didn’t know.

Annie knew. Not _how_ , but she knew why. Acceding waters were sent to ensnare each and every one of them, to level the playing field and remind them that they were _all_ at the mercy of the Capitol, that they were nothing, had nothing, owned nothing – not intelligence or survival skills or a deathly way with a sword – not even the very air in their lungs.

Two days after the arena flooded, a booming voice declared Annie Cresta had won the seventieth hunger games.

They say it was because she was the best swimmer.

Annie knew it was because she was the best at holding her breath.

  


* * *

  


The early months were just shy of unbearable. Her mother’s voice crackled on the line. “She’s not getting any better.” She cried most nights into the receiver, seeking the only recourse she could.

Finnick Odair lived two doors down, a phone call away, and more recently on the couch in the Crestas’ living room.

The mornings were hardest, whether or not she had slept. The night and its terrors seemed to infuse into her, and it took hours of sitting at the beach under raw sunlight before she would say a word.

“Did you tie your knots today, Annie?”

Maybe it was because he was one of the last voices she heard before the arena claimed her, but when he spoke to her the beacons lit and eventually, often very slowly, she found her way home.

“Every last one.” She reached into her bag and raised a passable slipknot she had tied two days ago as evidence. “See?”

Finnick laughed. Annie didn’t keep it a secret that she hated tying knots. _To each her own_. “Annie Cresta tied that knot today,” he said. “Real or not real?”

She shot him a look. “Are you being funny or is that a part of the therapy?”

“I’m not your _therapist_!”

She laughed. “Well then what are you?”

He examined her while he thought this over. “A friend.”

Annie smiled. She nodded. “Real.”

 

* * *

  


On her worst days, she would sit from dawn till dusk as if catatonic, no word or look or plea that could broach the insurmountable walls her mind had built to protect her from horror, but also stranded her from the ones who might save her.

When asked later, she would try to explain those moments. “If I open my mouth….” If she opened her lungs, in rushed the water to devour her, weigh her down, and she would sink to the black, endless bottom like the rocks and the children whose heads bobbed below and never resurfaced. “If I open my mouth I drown. I die.” It was just that simple.

Finnick took her hand. “You’re not in the water, Annie.”

“I’m always in the water.” Even now she could feel the icy fingers lacing around her neck. “I can never leave them.” She turned to him, said accusingly, “You told me if I won it would all be over. You said I could leave and never go back.”

“Annie, you’re not in the Capitol and you’re never going back.”

“But it came back with me,” she whispered. “I took a part of it with me.”

“We all do. But the question is, are you going to hold onto it forever?”

Annie cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, studying him. Up close, she always thought he resembled a well-loved toy, constantly fixed and re-stitched, yet still looking slightly broken. _Like attracts like_ , so she’s been told. Is that why Finnick was always found near her? “Are you?” she finally asked.

He shook his head and smiled. She thought he might laugh, perhaps cry. “Yes. Maybe.” He ran a hand through his hair. “They drag me back and won’t let me go. I’m a lost cause. But you?” He poked a finger into her arm. “You’ll stay in Four, no question. You can let it all go, try to forget, to heal.”

She swallowed. “To leave you behind?”

“If that’s what it takes.” He looked towards the ocean. Sailboats dotted the horizon, drifted with the wind and current. But he would always be on a leash, connected to the Capitol by speed dial and an armada of lightning fast trains. “I’m half Capitol, I know. If you want to outgrow them, you’ll have to outgrow me.”

“So you think you’re past saving.”

“I think there’s not anything worth to save.”

His bluntness struck Annie; she felt nearly blinded by the potency of his words until they sunk in, became mixed and diluted with other thoughts and finally resolved into a picture as clear as day: the two of them struggling in the same lifeboat.

Annie began to laugh. “Was that funny?” he asked, slightly on edge.

“No. No. But I just realized I spend all my time fighting for breath, while you’re busy trying to drown yourself.”

For a minute he sat in shocked silence. Then he started laughing. “Yeah. I guess we are a pair.” He wiped his eyes.

Her eyes blurred and she wiped them as well. “Quite a pair.” Her life was a constant battle to keep her head above water, keep the air in her lungs – air, the sustenance of life. But then and there Annie realized to truly live she must let it go. Let it go so she can take more in. Let it go so she can give it to another. “Such a pair that maybe we could help each other out?”

“You mean help each other breathe?”

She laughed. “Let’s not rush things. Help each other _learn_ to breathe, I think.” Of course she’d never leave him behind, _outgrow_ him. Because he needed her to fight for him, fight for every ounce of air. And because without him, she’d never stop holding her breath.

_Let it go._

He was her exhale.


End file.
